How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress

To build monthly income, building an affiliate store in WordPress blog is like putting money in the bank. Every post is like an investment that will pay you back again, and again, and again…

The next 8 weeks will be the busiest time of the year online. More people will search, shop, and buy than ANY OTHER TIME OF YEAR! What you do for these 2 months will determine how much income YOU WILL EARN during that period. Some bloggers and affiliates spend nearly the entire year getting ready for just these 2 months. I have used just about every affiliate product, service, and plugin out there – and for the next two months I’m going to post a lot about which ones work (and which ones don’t).

What is an Affiliate Datafeed?

In the past I’ve blogged briefly about data feeds twice: Create an Affiliate Store in 5 Minutes From a Data Feed, and Monetize Search Results with Data Feeds in WordPress. I will explain once again what a affiliate merchant “datafeed” is. If you are already an affiliate for Commission Junction, Google Affiliates, LinkShare, Pepperjam Network, or ShareASale you already know that you can sign up for Merchants that sell products. You can put up banner ads and text links on your blog or web site, and if someone clicks (and buys) – you get a small percentage commission on that sale for the referral. Most merchants now also allow you to find products on these affiliate sites, and will give you the copy and paste code to place actual products and descriptions on your blog or web site. Most of us have been blogging, and adding relevant products to our posts, reviews, and web pages for years.

Imagine if you had access to every product in a merchants store without having to copy and paste them all one by one by one? What if you could add thousands of products, pages, and categories turning your blog into a virtual store? When you visit Google Affiliates, ShareASale, LinkShare, and Commission Junction and view merchants product descriptions and links, what you see is just the result of a “merchant datafeed”. In other words, when you look for merchant product links for say – Target, Best Buy, or Sharper Image when you’re logged in to LinkShare or another affiliate program, the merchant supplied those products to them in a datafeed file. Nearly all affiliate programs will give the datafeed to YOU if you ask. Some now have tools where you can download the datafeed directly, or set it up to email to you or FTP to your web server. Depending on how many products that merchant has, the datafeed file can range from a few megabytes to hundreds of MB’s. Each datafeed file typically contains fields like title, product number or sku, description, keywords, image URL, buy URL, and more.

Problems Trying to Manage a Datafeed on Your Own

Problem #1: Actually getting the datafeed file

Once I first found out about datafeeds I was enthralled. I thought that I could use this data for all kinds of virtual online storefronts and I began to collect datafeeds from all over to see what I could do with them. Apparently, some affiliate programs were inundated with requests too – some datafeeds I didn’t get access to for months. Some affiliate programs wanted to charge a “setup fee” to get the datafeed to me, anywhere from $50 – $250 (per feed).

I did a lot of research to find software and scripts to setup BANS like niche stores from data files, as well as WordPress plugins, scripts, and downloadable software. Some were free, and others cost up to a few hundred dollars. Most had some useful qualities, but none did nearly as much as I was looking for (or had hoped).

Problem #3: Inconsistent or Bad Data

The worst thing about a data feed is the fact that merchants constantly update and remove products, so the data changes all the time. In addition, no two merchants use the same format. Some have descriptions, some don’t. Some have both a large image and a preview thumbnail, some don’t. Everybody names their fields differently, and every merchant has them in a different order. On top of that, merchants can their format at any time, name the datafeed file something new, or send a corrupted file my mistake (hosing up your entire virtual store). I had one merchant have all kinds of weird characters in their datafeed, probably something that didn’t translate well from another language to latin encoding.

How to Create an Affiliate Store Without Touching Datafeed Files

If you had wasted as many hours on this as I have you would most likely come to the same conclusion, manipulating these merchant datafeeds on your own (unless you’re a genius programmer) isn’t really much of an option. You know of the power that a datafeed could provide as an affiliate, but for some reason none of the affiliate programs like Commission Junction and ShareASale offer any tools at all other than copy and paste code for individual products. That’s pretty moronic if you ask me, I’ve always said that was an absolutely HUGE missed opportunity. I had (a glimmer) of hope earlier this year when I thought Pepperjam was developing some tools like this, but so far they have only made datafeed downloads available (like everyone else).

There are quite a few third party developers out there that have created products, and/or services for affiliate datafeeds. As I said – I’ve tried nearly of them that I could find. I’m going to give you a short list of affiliate datafeed tools I think you should look at – followed up by the one I think is better than anything I’ve ever seen…

GoldenCan: GoldenCAN is a datafeed integration service. They get the datafeeds, parse them, remove the garbage, and give you some copy and paste code to add little shops to your blog for merchant products. It’s free, costs no money, and is paid for by taking every “4th” click generated from your site. There are, however, 75 or so merchants that have paid to make their feed completely free (and you get all the clicks). Great little service for being free – not enough (in my opinion) to build a fully featured affiliate store.

PopShops: I only got interested in PopShops because I found out they had a Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress Widget. Their basic account is free, and the “Pro” version with SEO friendly URL’s is only $5 per month. With the widget, when you blog in WordPress using the visual editor, you can popup a window that allows you to search for products, and the results that come back are from all the merchant’s datafeeds they have in their database (some 20 million products). I liked their service (and still use it), but the only cons for me were the fact that you can only look up and add one product at a time, and you had to be very careful that you were signed up for the merchant the product came from (or no commissions for you!).

WebMerge: WebMerge is downloadable software that you install on your computer to parse a merchant affiliate datafeed file and created static web pages from it. It’s $99 for a single user license. I’m sure it can do what it says, but I’ve been building web sites for 13 years and I found it hard to use, hard to setup, and the static pages I created were pretty piss poor, even after creating a “template”.

My Datafeed Scripts: This site sells scripts that parse ShareASale datafeeds (only). I’m sure they work fine, but I wouldn’t pay a hundred bucks for scripts that only work for ShareASale merchants.

Feedshare: Feedshare seems to have a great service, with the ability to build mini-shops as well. You can also setup products and shops using both JavaScript and PHP. The drawback seems to be they only have 45 merchants listed, and the only one who I even knew was Overstock.com. This service appears to be free, so there’s your “pro”.

AffiliStore: When I found Affilistore I really thought I had the holy grail. This free downloadable script sets up an affiliate store that sucks up datafeed files and creates products, categories, and pages including seo titles and descriptions. The sample stores look great, but I found the script provided very mixed results depending on your datafeed format. In the end, it was too much work, categories weren’t working right, some links were breaking, and it was just taking completely too much time for what it was worth. It basically would have been a BANS like niche store, but with affiliate links from a datafeed. I’m glad this never worked out (for me), now that google is attacking “thin affiliate” sites anyway. You’re welcome to try it out, but be warned – “your mileage may vary…”.

How I Recommend Setting Up an Affiliate Store

DatafeedR: Having tried just about everything I could find to setup an affiliate store from a data feed, I think that I may finally HAVE found the Holy Grail of tools! DatafeedR is a service that you can sign up for to build affiliate stores from merchant datafeeds. They get the feeds, remove all the crap and format them so you can add them to your web site or blog. You can add products from Commission Junction, ShareASale, LinkShare, NetShops, Bridalux, AND Clickbank (something none of the previously mentioned products will do).

I just couldn’t believe when I found DatafeedR that it did nearly everything I’d been looking for, for so long…

Features of DatafeedR:

Create unlimited affiliate stores

Drip feed products into blog posts

Products Sidebar Widget

Unbranded (no “powered by” text or links

Pick products from multiple merchants and networks

Include up to 100,000 products per store

Product categories

Breadcrumbs

SEO friendly URL’s

Meta Description and keywords tags

Editing of product titles and descriptions

Add original content to ANY product, category, or store page

Product “tagging”

full HTML and CSS control

Choose what to display (description, image, URL, etc.)

I will be using DatafeedR for the next 2 months to prepare all my blogs and web sites for the holiday season. I will blog about everything I’m doing with DatafeedR multiple times per week. I encourage you to follow this series to see if you can benefit from it as well. The next installment will show how to set DatafeedR up and all the customization options that are available. Stay Tuned!

About The Author

John Pratt has been working online as a digital marketer and project manager for more than 20 years. His online passions include WordPress, SEO, digital strategy, content marketing, affiliate marketing, and hacking technology.
You can contact me here.
Read about how I spend my spare time here.

Well, first of all – I have never liked or used the overpriced PHPBay plugin for eBay auctions, I use BayRSS instead. Second, as you’ll find as this series goes on – you’ll need to use DatafeedR, an eBay plugin, and Amazon items all 3 for best results. Nothing does it all…

@Kris Jones – Thanks for the heads up – I’ll be reviewing that for sure. =;; I can tell you right off the bat the “powered by” link is a turn off. Nobody wants to hand google silver bullets to find affiliate links…

This looks really interesting as I’ve spent a lot of time looking for something similar. After the wipeout of BANS sites in Google, I’m cautious about any affiliate scheme that might derail my page ranks or index status… Can you explain why DatafeedR won’t draw the same kind of fire that other affiliates did?

I’ve been switching over many of my BANS sites to Mark Hansen’s (Niche Store Builder) hybrid WP/BANS format and this seems to be working well so far. The templates are free. I realize that BANS only provides ebay products, so other scripts are needed for other merchants. My concern is that Google will smell a rat and realize that all these blogs are now overloaded with affiliate stores.

Anyway, I’ll be reading this next series with interest!

BTW, I think $27/month is a bit spendy for a service that’s not proven itself safe from the wrath of Google… the good thing is that if Google hates it you can always cancel the subscription!

Thanks for this post, your timing could not have been better, in fact it’s almost like you read my mind. I spent almost 4 hours last weekend looking for an easy way to parse and RSS feed and I got absolutely no where.

I will be checking out using DataFeedR and GoldenCan this weekend on a couple of my sites.

FYI, it doesn’t look like the Pepperjam store builder will be SEO friendly as it’s rendered by a Javascript. I also had some problems getting it to work right this morning, but I’m sure they’re right on working the kinks out.

@Alice – for many reasons DatafeedR will be different. For one, it’s a monthly subscription fee, so 25,000 people won’t buy it once for $99 and then setup hundreds or thousands of sites. Bans is too cheap for an unlimited license and designed to setup sites with little or no content and thousands of auctions (already listed on eBay). DatafeedR is designed to complement a blog with quality original content. If you use it the right way – your results should be drastically different. Google shouldn’t be concerned with affiliate store “overloading” unless your blog is a thin affiliate site in the first place. As I post in this series, I think you’ll find that $27/mo is pretty reasonable for what you get…

Hey JT,
I am a complete “idiot” when it comes to this datafeed stuff, but I could see the powerful possibilities in it. I have some niche sites that aren’t doing that great, so I was looking for something that would help me add more content to them. I found the affiliate datafeed profit system plugin for wordpress.

OMG. It is so awesome. I am in love with it. I have started so many new sites in the last week and I am already getting search traffic to them. This plugin automates everything, adding your affiliate ID the data feed, posting for you, everything. All you do is upload it like a regular plugin and then go to settings.

You can choose to filter your results by keyword, then you can choose how many products you want in each post. You choose between a range and it randomizes the posts. You can choose how many posts you want made, between 2 numbers, and then how long you want them scheduled over ~ between 7 days and 30 days.

Click go and the plugin does it all for you. You can go check your posts in the manage section. For my niche sites I change the titles, and add a little more original content.

This plugin only works at Shareasale, but if you have more than one datafeed that will work with your keyword it will pull products from all of them randomly thereby increasing the level of unique content even more.

OK. This totally sounds like a sales page. I am just so happy with this plugin. I bought BayRSS on your recommend and since Ebay went to the new affiliate program have had lousy sales. I’m excited to have another option to monetize my sites easily, effortlessly really, with “real” products.

I´m developing my first affiliate site right now in WordPress.
Struggling to find a good affiliate store template though -. the site is most likely going to be static pages.
I set my first site tenerifemortgagebroker.com up in WordPress, used a lot of plugins and it is now generating a decent amount of business.
I started in August and knew absolutley nothing about websites, SEO, wordpress etc so sites like yours have been incredibly valuable to me – Ranking between 1 and 5 in Google for loads of key phrases I chose so Many Thanks.

My latest site is RugsForSale . Net – not sure if its a great one to go at or not but I´m committed now and will crack on following all the instructions here and see how things pan out.
Hopefully I´ll learn from my mistakes and each site I do will get better and better.

Best of luck with this blog – the information here is some of the best and most useful I have read so far – well done!

I discovered PopShops a few weeks ago and love it. Anytime i can perform a task within my WP dashboard, i’m very happy.

PopShops is free and so far i’ve used it to promote some Halloween costumes on a blog of mine. The network feed was from CJ and yes one does need to be careful to pick a merchant one is a part of. As it wont signal that you’re NOT a member.

But this is a nice option for inserting products in a blog post or page QUICKLY.

For niche eBay stores you cant go wrong with phpBay. I am a fanatical user, and have written several popular add-ons for it. Its also a small price to pay for the level of support you get.

If you are looking for a good alternative in an often overlooked, but rapidly growing, affiliate program then give the phpOStock plugin for WordPress a try. It draws its data from Overstock.com. It will co-exist perfectly with phpBay on the same page/post, and comes with a sidebar widget. Very easy to combine data from multiple sources to create great “mash ups”.

You are bookmarked my friend. . . setting up datafeedr now – I am too excited….right behind you my friend….I’m using a deadly combination of firepow / datafeedr / bookmarking demon / and PPC…. If you offer some sort of personal coaching please contact me….Love to have you over looking my shoulder!!
Thank you sir,
Michael

Hi, i’m starting with the blogs as well, was looking for the way to integrate product pages into the blogs posts. I came to your page through the warrior forum. Just for your readers benefit you can get a discount there if you think of joining datafeedr. I’m also thinking of taking the plunge and subscribing to datafeedr.

OMG, chock full of great stuff, I can’t wait to try the DatafeedR. I think this is what I need. I took the commission ritual course by Brian Johnson, very good, but if you want to know more then you have to pay him $59 a month to know everything, and that makes me a little mad, when there is so much free info on the web, like RIGHT HERE! Thanks, you are book-marked for life.

Very good post and write-up. Datafeeds are defiantly the future of affiliate marketing in my opinion and tools such as Datafeedr and the plugin that I have created (http://www.digitalquill.co.uk/datafeedplugin/) allow you to rapidly create an affiliate website in minutes.

The only problem I sometimes face is the quality of the datafeed its self. If a merchant does not update their data or does not re-publish the feed often enough, however, if more affiliates start using datafeeds then collective pressure to keep on top of these types of things will improve things.